


iris

by ikijai



Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Introspection, No Dialogue, Other, Post-Season/Series 01, Post-Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 10:01:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13164600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ikijai/pseuds/ikijai
Summary: It'll open up the scars that'd just finished healing. It won't make up for what he's done, what he'staken.





	iris

In the academy, they’re trained not to be too invested, not with targets or ordinates or co-workers. They’re trained to be detached and insensitive when obligated. Not to tremble as they watch others descend into nothing until there is no pulse as the tell tale sign of life.

This is the profession, at the end of the day. _This is what it does_ , they tell her when she discovers the operation that killed a friend. They tell her it’s okay to feel, but not for too long. When you feel for too long, you drown in it. You don’t come back.

 _You’ve got to get back up. You’ve got to move on_ , they tell her insessantly.

Dinah thinks there should be an exception when you’ve watched two partners die instead of just one.

Their words are useless, they persuade her to take off work for a while like it'll make any kind of difference. Like it'll make anything okay.

 _To get better_ , they'd insisted. _Time will do you well_. But it isn't time she needs.

The physical injuries will heal in time. The others, though, will stay black and blue no matter what year it is.

Others always told her she tried too much, that she cared too intensely. She’d yell at the other kids when they wronged her, would pretend not to feel the tightness in her throat when they called her a try-hard and kicked her out.

This is different, though. This time, she doesn't feel it, is numb to it despite everything that’s transpired.

It’s Billy Russo, tied to an intensive care unit bed, unmoving yet still haunting her like the worst kind of idyllic nightmare.

He tore into her like a knife, tied an iron ball to her waist, watched her drown with the sadistic twist to his lips that used to turn her on, used to do the opposite of fill her with disgust. She seems to draw the type of demon he is. Perhaps she’s poisoned, inviting like a flower with too many thorns.

It's ironic, she thinks. That there was a time when the job was the only thing she obsessed over.

Pride doesn't stop her. Neither does the pain throbbing through her system like it owns her. She visits the intensive care until every day, pulls out her badge when nurses try to pry out words she isn’t prepared to speak yet. She tells herself she keeps showing up only to watch him suffer though it won't be enough. He’ll still deserve worse than what he got.

His pretty face is all torn up, all jagged scars that’ll never heal properly. Good, she thinks. She isn’t the only one permanently wounded.

Trust isn’t a word she’s ever known anything but the denotative definition to, a word that leaves a sour taste at the tip of her tongue each time she thinks she’s daring enough to use it.

She didn’t trust Billy, but she’d wanted to. She'd wanted to up until that moment in the staircase when all the pieces fit together. She didn't see it coming because she didn't _want to_. Now she’s stuck with that knowledge and instead of making it better, it only makes it worse.

The taste doesn’t go away, either. It develops and intensifies even in dingy bars after too many drinks or her parents’ bedroom when it gets too tough to deal with.

Dinah watches him from the distance she’s decided she can take, doesn’t know what the debilitating lack of breath that comes with it means and doesn’t want to. She’s terrified to know, so she ignores it and steps further from the door, closer to where he lays like a puppet wrapped in dirty gauze. There are tubes and wires poking out in every direction. It doesn’t make it better, yet she still waits.

Some days, he deteriorates obviously. Other days, he breathes on his own and she’s got to physically force down the urge to pull the plug and turn her back. But she isn’t wired that way. Even this traitorous piece of shit can’t make her dishonest. It’s impossible and she hates it. Watching Billy Russo because no one else will is the only thing she can do. She ignores her parents’ pleas to take a sleeping pill, ignores their tragic voices in the back of her head when she goes where she knows she shouldn’t.

But Billy Russo is something like a demon who won’t let up. She used him and he used her back. He used her good and dried her out and none of it is okay. The hatred is skin deep, ties an immovable knot in her stomach like a thread pulled too tight.

It’ll be a pleasure to watch him die.

But it won’t make things different. Ultimately, he still killed her partner, still watched a man’s wife and kids die at the park on a sunny day and didn’t do a damn thing to prevent it. The man she’d tracked. The man he’d tricked.

Ultimately, it’ll be her undoing. It’ll open up the scars that’d just finished healing. It won’t make up for what he’s done, what he’s _taken_.

It won’t be proper justice, won’t be jail time or death sentences carried out by a judge downtown.

She thinks of the way he touched her physically and psychologically. He dug in deep, pretended to look out for her while she mourned as he watched with that devilish twinkle in the dark depths he called eyes. He’d kissed her, touched his tongue to hers. They'd been more intimate than she’d allowed any person to be with her in a long time. She knows why when she thinks of him pulling that trigger on her in the park without a moment’s hesitance. She is well versed in deceit, but that, that she didn't expect. She didn’t expect it when they went out for drinks or when they shared too-private things behind closed doors. Because of him, intimacy will forever be a dirty thing, a tainted thing.

There are no tears as she stands closer to his bed with each passing day, close enough to touch. She wants to yell in his face, wants to scream at the top of her lungs until he's deaf from the sound. But she keeps quiet because that isn't why she's there. There is only desolation as a defining trait. It's the way she won’t let tears drop despite how traumatized she is. The way she’ll die if she stops moving even if it's the only thing she wants to do.

But there is unfinished business, she tells herself. So she’ll do what she’s trained to do. She’ll keep digging.

She won’t think about Kandahar or dead bodies that used to be friends or tub drains dirtied with her own blood. Instead, she’ll do her duty.


End file.
